The Center for Functional Neuroimaging Technologies (CFNT) cleaves to and advances the primary mission of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center: to expand understanding of the human brain in health and disease through the development and dissemination of innovative multimodal Magnetic Resonance (MR)-based neuroimaging techniques and technologies.

The four Technical Projects at the core of the CFNT bring together an interdisciplinary team of scientists, engineers and clinicians whose goal is to advance neuroimaging technologies to achieve an unprecedented combination of physiological precision and spatiotemporal resolution. The projects seek to create new methods for exploring brain function using both anatomical and functional aspects of MRI, electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and near-infrared diffuse optical tomography (NIR-DOT), and to create new tools for both neuroanatomic and statistical analysis.

Although the Resource is structured around the core technical projects and collaborative research, the
projects are all closely interwoven, and no hard boundaries exist between them. Interactions between the projects occur at the basic technical level, as well as through unifying
biological questions that our core projects address as key proving grounds for their technology.

Descriptions of the projects can be found below and on the associated pages.

This project is extending the ability to define ever-more specific brain regions from high-resolution MRI data, broadening these capabilities to encompass new classes of tissue required for multimodal integration efforts at the Center, and studying ex-vivo tissues to push the boundaries of in-vivo spatial resolution still further.

This project focuses on improving the image accuracy, repeatability, and contrast-to-noise ratio of DOT images, as well as depth sensitivity, by advancing the optical instrumentation to provide more uniform spatial coverage of the brain.